Why You Hear From Me Every Morning

A thank-you to everyone who reads, and a quiet invitation, with a note about the twenty years behind it.

Most mornings, a short devotional from me is waiting in your inbox before the day takes over. That daily note is the heart of what I do here, and it is the thing that actually arrives in your email.

I publish more than that, and I want to be clear about the difference. Some things I send straight to your inbox: the morning devotional, the Friday reflections, the guides our Grace Groups use. Other things I simply post on the site for anyone who wants to go further: the Voices of the Bible readings, the worship liturgy behind Sunday, the planning notes for a series, the full sermon each week. The daily email is the promise. The rest is there when you want it.

I have also been at this far longer than this publication suggests. My first post in ministry went up on August 30, 2006, which makes this August twenty years. I have carried the writing across a few platforms since then, sometimes posting almost daily, sometimes going quiet for long stretches. This is simply its latest home, and right now it is the most faithful I have been to the practice.

I want to tell you what these months have built, and then I want to say thank you.

When I started again here, I did not know who would read. The honest answer turned out to be more of you than I expected, and from further away than I imagined. Most readers are here in McPherson. Some are scattered across a few states. A handful check in from places I have never been. What holds you together is not geography. It is that you open the email, you read a few paragraphs, and you let them sit with you on the way into your own morning.

That is the whole point. I do not write to be impressive. I write hoping it will be useful for your life of faith: a line of scripture turned a slightly new way, a question worth sitting with, a reminder that grace is already at work in the ordinary parts of a Tuesday. Whether it actually helps your own spiritual journey is not mine to measure. I can only hope that it does.

Almost everything here is free, and it will stay that way. The daily devotionals, the reflections, the Grace Group guides, the worship resources, the Voices of the Bible, the reading-together posts: free, always, because that is the right default for a pastor writing to the people he serves. You never have to pay anything to belong here or to read along. A couple of things sit behind a paid subscription, the full Sunday sermon manuscripts and a monthly personal note, and those are there for readers who want to support the work, not because they are the real content.

If this writing has meant something to you, and only if you have both the means and the desire, you can support it directly now. A few readers already have, and I am grateful to them. Think of it less as a purchase and more as a way of saying, keep going.

I am not trying to make this big. A small, faithful readership, mostly people I will actually see this week, is exactly the kind of thing worth tending well.

So this is my first quarterly note, and mostly it is a thank-you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for forwarding a devotional to someone who needed it. Thank you for telling me, in the grocery store or after worship, that a particular morning landed. That is its own kind of gift, and it keeps me showing up at the page.

I will see you tomorrow morning, same as always.

Grace and peace,
Andrew